It's amusingly depressing to speculate about what career choices such people should favor. I'd suggest that they stay out of: engineering, manufacturing, sales, any management job with a P&L attached to it, medicine (as a physician, nurse, or technician), railroading & shipping, and most definitely anything to do with aviation. They will probably be best off working in "nonprofit" organizations, or possibly in the unaccountable "staff" jobs of which there are too many in certain corporations.

David, just what kind of nonprofits are you disparaging here? The Eagle Forum? ACORN? Focus on the Family, which seems to be better managed than many a Fortune 500 company? The Nature Conservancy, with its 88 percent efficiency rating, multibillion-dollar budget and 100 million acres of land to manage?

Or perhaps you're referring to smaller nonprofits like the ones in my community. One of them is a local radio station. Its tiny paid staff keeps the station running on a shoestring budget and certainly does not lack accountability--if they don't manage their meager budget wisely, the station shuts down and a sizable chunk of the community immediately shows up at the station door with pitchforks demanding to know why they're not getting Prairie Home Companion or Car Talk--pretty severe accountability.

Another local nonprofit provides a variety of services to developmentally disabled people who, with the help of paid and volunteer staff, would otherwise be cooped up in state homes (formerly known as asylums). The group's finances are audited regularly by state regulators, health inspections must be passed, and workers must be trained in medication protocols. Re the latter--if the staff doesn't do its job, the developmentally disabled clients go into comas, have seizures, commit crimes or are victimized by crimes, etc., and believe me, when that happens people *are* held accountable.

I respectfully submit that your overly broad disparagement of "nonprofits" thoughtlessly insults an awful lot of goodhearted, hardworking, and competent people.

David, I think you missed the obvious.

I think they'd be best suited for academia.

ES..I had in mind more the Washington "policy" and "think tank" organizations, not to mention quasi-governmental entities like PBS and NPR, and international agencies like IMF, World Bank, and the UN. The kind of people who think they should get good grades based purely on effort or on showing up are probably unlikely to be interested in working for the organiation for the disabled which you mention, or to stay there long if they did take a job there.

Fair point that there are useful non-profit organizations doing good things with hard-working people, but there is also a vast array of non-profit organizations of very dubious value.

Student entitlement is infuriating.

But more infuriating is the sheer lack of rigor in grading -- and this is *not* a new thing.

How many English classes provide students with examples -- for *every* essay -- of what an A, B, C, D, and F essay looks like? How many history professors give detailed rubrics for every written assignment breaking down the skills being evaluated and the number of points awarded for each skill?

How many professors who use "objective" tests (true/false, multiple choice) compile detailed, question-by-question analyses after the test of the number of correct and incorrect responses for each question, to ensure that the students aren't simply suffering because a certain skill or data set wasn't taught on a day when the professor wasn't doing so well? How many of these same professors compile a detailed analysis of the skill and data set being tested in every question in order to determine exactly what the student is failing to understand, and how many provide remediation in the case that a certain skill or data set was not presented too well in the first place?

How many professors provide detailed lesson plans for every day of instruction describing the skills and data sets being taught, the means of determining student performance before instruction, a means of determining student performance after instruction, and a detailed comparison of how many students grasped specific skills and data sets after the instruction?

How many departments ensure that every professor teaching at a certain "level" (which should mean teaching similar skills and types of data) shares the same rubric for evaluating essays, projects, presentations, etc.? How many departments ensure that professors provide uniform opportunities for revision, retesting, extra credit, "participation" grades, etc.?

Finally, and most obviously, how many schools have explicit definitions of what an "A" or "C" or "F" means? How many schools have classes in which the average grade is a D (as in some math classes I've seen -- which suggests something about the use of tests as a scare tactic or punishment, and suggests something of the idea of what instruction means)? How many schools have classes in which students are graded on the basis of progress (as in, say, a freshman composition class, in which a student who first writes a D essay and progresses to a B+ essay might actually receive an "A" for overall improvement of writing skills)?

Grading remains more (and has traditionally been more) than an objective analysis of a student's progress in grasping the skills and data sets taught. It remains (and has traditionally been) a means of punishing, shaming, praising, inspiring, and morally judging students as well. Until schools decide to have a detailed discussion of exactly what should be taught in each course and how best to evaluate how this material is taught and learned and what exactly a grade means for a particular assignment, I think grades will remain an almost meaningless thing (beyond, say, determining simple distinctions among fail, pass, and excelling).

Finally, (and most obviously), how many professors

Tragically, at this point Luther's head exploded.

(No real comment here -- I just was amused by the mid-sentence cut-off.)

...does it take to screw in a light bulb?

I suppose we shouldn't joke, actually. Maybe something serious did happen to cut Luther off....

No, just a bad cut and paste error. You'll notice the penultimate paragraph has the same beginning as the bit that got off. How many points will you deduct? Let's be brave graders and give me a C. Then we can sleep soundly, knowing we gave a bad grade instead of a good one.

Well, tempting as it is, Luther, you have accumulated sufficient ethos over your time here that I figured it was probably a computer issue. BTW, I'll also cut my kids some slack on that one.

OTOH, if I see a mistake like that on a submitted final draft in one of my classes, I will dock the grade, not because it makes me feel better but because it goes to the student in question's ethos, and hence his/her rhetorical effectiveness. Losing a few points reinforces the value of proofing, be it a paper on Ibsen or a resume down the line.

LOL at Warren and Eveningsun.

Luther, my excellent organic chemistry professor had a very simple means of making sure his teaching was effective. He gave a 20-question in-class quiz every Friday, hitting the high points of the material we'd covered that week. Immediate feedback, for him and for us. He could speed up or slow down the next week, as needed. Comparing my knowledge base to that of other chemistry majors I've worked with confirmed for me that as a teacher he was a cut above.

He liked his subject matter and thought it was cool and interesting; and he liked his students, and wanted all of us to succeed in his class. Not an easy grader by any means; for him "succeed" meant "learn some chemistry" rather than "get an A". I wish all professors were like him.

I've seen a lot of postings across the internets about the issue of grading, just lately. It amuses me to see people talk about what will be tolerated "in real life" because in real life, people get by with murder if their boss likes them, is clueless, or is too lazy or intimidated to do anything about them. Think "group project" every day.

Warren, I too would probably dock points for such an error.

However, I've been considering the logic of such an evaluation. In a four page high school essay, how many mechanical errors are worth how many points? Docking points would suggest we are also awarding points whenever a student gets something right. So if a small essay has hundreds of mechanics choices, how do we take points off for one mistake? If an essay is worth one hundred points, is one mistake really worth one point or three or five? If so, then the grading scale is completely odd.

Rubrics make things a bit clearer. We might say: 20 points for a well-formulated thesis; 20 points for organization and transitions; 20 points for specific evidence; 20 points for insightful analysis; and 20 points for mechanics and formatting. But once those hundreds of mechanics choices are assigned 20 points, we'd have to say that one or a few minor errors are barely worth one point.

A better choice is for teachers to be explicit about exactly what aspects of an essay will be evaluated in a given assignment. I might say that verb tense, MLA citations, and concrete nouns/active verbs are the main mechanic/stylistic components under evaluation. This way, a few mistakes can cost the student a decent number of points. If I were a better teacher, I'd have a file with each student's three common writing errors (every writer has three, no matter how good she is), and students would be evaluated individually based on what skills that students needs to work on.

Laura, a weekly quiz is a quick and easy solution to some of the issues I raised, provided the professor analyzes the quiz results and determines what exactly the students are struggling with. But if another section of Chem is only giving a few major, challenging exams each semester, then there's a discrepancy between what a grade in one section of Chem means and what it means in another section. So again, the grade becomes pretty meaningless in establishing across-the-board comparisons among students, at one school and especially across many schools.

Ah. Well, I went to a very small school. We had one teacher of organic, and one section per semester.

My daughter is finishing up her biology degree there. It's still a very small school, of course. Yesterday she had her exit exam, which is a national test for biology majors and will compare her education to that of other biology students in the country. We did not have such a thing in my day. Because her performance on it will help to determine that she graduates - if she did poorly she won't - she considered that test to be very high-stakes for her, but of course it measures the school's performance as well.

I just looked at that ACTA report. I can agree with many of their suggestions. Others left me confused. I read, for example, that "In the face of acknowledged grade inflation, the Princeton University faculty limited the percentage
of A’s a department could give: no more than 35% of students in any class can receive an A."

But departments don't give grades; teachers do. Did Princeton decide that, of all the grades given by teachers in a department, no more than 35 percent may be A's? That hardly makes sense (and would seem to be hard to implement). Or does "class" here mean "graduating class"? I suppose the policy means that if I have a section with only six students, as happens occasionally, I could give A's to no more than two, no matter how well the others performed? As the ACTA report itself noted, "Enforcing a grade point average for a school or a class—particularly in high-level courses for majors in the field—can unjustly punish students who are well prepared and highly motivated."

We had the grade-inflation conversation at my own school some years ago. One result was that we started including average grades for each class on the instructor's student evaluations, and asked retention, tenure, and promotion committees to look favorably on instructors that earned high evaluations even in courses with low grade averages. I'm a little surprised the ACTA report didn't mention this simple fix.

FWIW, I noticed the report mentions reforms undertaken at Harvard, Duke, Stanford, Cornell, Wellesley, Dartmouth, Boston University, George Washington University.... Not a community college or a second-tier state college in sight. This elitism is quite typical of ACTA. Do ACTA-ites not know institutions like mine exist? Do they just not care about us? Do they think there's nothing to learn by talking to us? Have they not considered the possibility that we might have thought up something useful on our own? Are they afraid if they set foot on one of our campuses they'll get cooties?

Rubrics and course/assignment objectives only go so far.

Am I the only one who's ever had a screeching student scream, "Your grading is wrong!"?

Irrational students do not read instructions, they ignore rubrics, and they play dumb with assignment and course objectives.

But, they "really, really tried!"

How many professors provide detailed lesson plans for every day of instruction describing the skills and data sets being taught, the means of determining student performance before instruction, a means of determining student performance after instruction, and a detailed comparison of how many students grasped specific skills and data sets after the instruction?

How many departments ensure that every professor teaching at a certain "level" (which should mean teaching similar skills and types of data) shares the same rubric for evaluating essays, projects, presentations, etc.? How many departments ensure that professors provide uniform opportunities for revision, retesting, extra credit, "participation" grades, etc.?

My daughter's grade school does that in every class and for just about everything. Guess that is why at nine years old her test scores equal that of the average high school senior's.

It seems that every class ought to be structured that way. Aren't college classes set up in that fashion? If gradeschool classes are, surely college profs can meet the bar.